The Land Where the Blues Began.

Alan Lomax, now nearly eighty years old, is a legendary figure in the annals of American popular music. As an historian and collector of songs, his career spans the era in which blues music rose from remote Southern hollows to an internationally commercial art form. Various scholars have chronicled the idiom. In his many books, articles, and films Alan Lomax has left a singular mark on that history: his poetic voice, driven by a passion for the musician's struggle, radiates on every page he writes.

With a muckraker's zeal, he began traveling rural backroads during the Depression with his father, John, whose folk music writings set a high standard. Together they recorded songs and life-tales of singer - seven men in prison. More than a memoir, The Land Where the Blues Began recounts Lomax's journeys over the last half-century. Shifting back and forth in time, it is sharpened by historical insights and reflections of the heart. Of prisons, he writes: "Despite die guards, who sat by during all the recording sessions, despite our own pale faces, which must have seemed like masks of indifference to so many of them, the convicts filled our records with a thousand moving songs, an epic of hot sun and brutality and human courage, mounted upon sincere and profound melodies."

Part of Lomax's influence on writers who cover music is his insistence on treating the lyrics, rhythms, and body language of dance steps as a cultural vocabulary, a coded way of embracing life among those on the bottom of society. The new book sees blues through the prism of a culture resisting forms of racial domination that today may seem archaic.

The story opens in 1942 in Delta plantation country as the author, eluding thuggish deputy sheriffs, locates the mother of Robert Johnson, whose haunted lyrics echoed the tragedy of his early death - poisoned (presumably) in a lovers' quarrel. From the grieving mother's shack, Lomax moves on to find Son House, who had been a mentor to Johnson.

Lomax's concept of the blues provides a counterweight, of sorts, to ideas about the splintering of black families. "Orphaned by their society," he writes, "the itinerant Delta bluesmen created songs that appealed to women for sympathy and a place to hang their hats....[I]t was the degree to which each bluesman experienced the sense of pain and loss that accompanies the disappearance of parents, which determined the way they sang the blues. Those bluesmen who grew up in solid families or were left to the care of beneficent grandparents or other caring relatives seem less agonized, at least to my ear." Such comments tie the narrative together with illuminating threads and extend the psychological terrain of the music.

Important new cultural dynamics emerged after the early-century black migrations to the urban North. "Constant fear and humiliation had disappeared from their lives," Lomax writes. "[W]hen the folks went out on the town, such a hilarious, wild, moody, and eccentric sound arose in the gin mills and dance halls on the South Side - such a wailing of cm", such a braying of trombones, such a singing of trumpets, such a river of rhythm from pianos, guitars, and drums...burst out."

Some will take exception to Lomax's labeling Chicago "the capital city of jazz and blues," given the predominant role of New York as the commercial arena, and of New Orleans as the wellspring of jazz and rhythm-and-blues. But critical caveats are inevitable with a book of such sweep.

The author occasionally fails to meet his own exacting standards, as when he passes on the story of Bessie Smith, dying after an automobile accident in Mississippi because no white hospital would admit her - a tale that Chris Albertson disputed convincingly in his major biography of the great blues singer.

Lomax's last chapter is a bittersweet reflection of how far the nation has come in embracing African-American artistry. In New York he conducts a long interview with Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim, and Sonny Boy Williamson. When he plays back the recording they make him promise not to reveal their names. "It didn't matter that the three of them lived in Chicago," he writes. "When those Deep Delta peckerwoods heard the records, they'd come looking for them. If they couldn't find them, they'd go after their families, bum down their houses."

"This was America in 1948," writes Lomax. "I kept my promise until 1990" - by which time the three men were dead. The world of media lights and recording contracts has moved closer to the blues. Yet the land where the blues began, the deep Delta counties of Mississippi, is still economically grim for most blacks, and ravaged now by drugs and drive-by shootings. Rap music is the voice of the new generation, an idiom whose coarsest manifestations celebrate violence and degradation of women. Lomax devotes less than two pages to rap, and those are largely taken up with a structural analysis of the idiom.

Lomax approaches music in much the way Theodore White covered politics - as a romantic. The rise of early jazz and blues, even midcentury rhythm-and-blues, fits that thematic embrace. Today's harsher pop idioms can be traced back in certain ways to the older forms. But an imagination of violence permeates the postmodern psyche and its nihilism seems to betray the more soulful message of yesteryear's great passion lyrics.